{"id":6230,"date":"2019-09-30T07:07:48","date_gmt":"2019-09-30T11:07:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=6230"},"modified":"2019-09-17T09:06:04","modified_gmt":"2019-09-17T13:06:04","slug":"the-sunken-temple-of-chloren-var","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=6230","title":{"rendered":"The Sunken Temple of Chloren-Var"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Peter Racek\nWolfhill Entertainment\nOSR\nLevels 1-4<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Plunged deep beneath forsaken swamplands centuries ago, the Sunken Temple of Chloren-Var now waits to be rediscovered.\u00a0 Untold fortune, magic, and ancient secrets await those brave enough to enter the Sunken Temple, but only if they can thwart the unrelenting evil which lurks within its dismal halls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Uh, so, yeah, this is a thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This one hundred page adventure features a dungeon with about seventy rooms. MASSIVE amounts of read-aloud lead to an adventure that is nigh incomprehensible. This is then combined with a \u201cgeneric\u201d system of play, based on D&D, that seems more like a fantasy heartbreaker. Light on treasure, I\u2019m still having a hard time figuring out what is going with it after going through it multiple times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I don\u2019t know where to start with this. You go to an inn to find no room in it. Then someone gets killed and you get their room. In it you find a hook to the sunken temple. I guess the motivation is redeeming the dead guy by doing what he failed to do in the dungeon?\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What follows is fifty to sixty pages of read-aloud. In italics. I know I\u2019m prone to hyperbole, but I\u2019m not fucking around. It\u2019s about fifty or sixty pages of read-aloud. The vast VAST majority of the text in this is read-aloud. In italics.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
First the italics. It\u2019s hard to read. Italics works fine for a phrase or to call attention to one part of the text but it is TERRIBLE for long stretches of text. It\u2019s hard to read. Box it, shade it, indent it, but don\u2019t italics ong sections of text. It\u2019s a major usability issue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Of course, then there\u2019s the length of the read-aloud proper. MOUNTAINS of it. There are page long sections of read-aloud. Every room is full of it. It\u2019s unbelievable; I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve ever seen a product like this before \u2026 maybe in Sword of the Bastard Elf or Ocean of Lard? But those were Choose Your Own Adventure things \u2026 and it feels like even THEY didn\u2019t have this much.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s bad design 101. People don\u2019t listen to read-aloud. I\u2019ll point out again that WOTC study that found that players stop paying attention after two or three sentences of read-aloud. Clearly designers haven\u2019t gotten the message.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I know the arguments: zero-prep. Easy to run. But man, there\u2019s far, far, easier and better ways to accomplish that. Slapping \u201cPlayers React\u201d in the middle of a p[age of read-aloud is not the way to immerse folks and have a good game. There\u2019s so much read-aloud, and it forms in to such a wall of text, that\u2019s it hard for the DM to figure out what is going on inside of this place. Further, when the read-aloud TELLS the players what they feel and think, that\u2019s bad read-aloud. There\u2019s no cohesiveness readily apparent to help the DM run this. After a few runs through the text I\u2019m still having trouble figuring out how the place is supposed to operate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s bolding & indents, which shows an attempt to make things more readable. But it doesn\u2019t work well. The room headings are bolded also, so all of the bolding runs together in places giving an even more wall of text vibe. And Wall of Text is a usability issue. A major one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The system used here is generic, and based on D&D. It feels more like the old Role Aids generic than it does the Eldritch Enterprises generic. I can\u2019t figure out why the choice was made. You didn\u2019t want to include the Labyrinth Lord license? Deeper in to this, there are new systems for fear, lighting (to the extent that its DM advice includes discouraging light spells and the party bringing in torches and oil. Uh \u2026 No.) new systems for locks and searching. There\u2019s more than little fantasy heartbreaker going on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And it\u2019s random, in places, for the sake of being random. Where are the secret rooms? Roll for it! What are some key plot elements? Roll for it! Why is this? It would have been much simpler to just write a standard adventure, I don\u2019t see this sort of randomness complementing the adventure at all. It\u2019s similar, I guess, to the random elements to Ravenloft.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is a curiosity only, to see how far read-aloud can be pushed in an adventure. It\u2019s got very low interactivity, with the party fighting skeletons and couple of puzzles. Treasure is very light for a Gold=XP system, as core OSR is. Let\u2019s hope future offerings are better,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is $6 at Drivethru. The preview is sixteen pages. In spite of this, you\u2019re going to get no sample rooms, so it\u2019s a failure. Scrolling to the end, you do get to see the (VERY long) intro, and all of the read aloud, which IS an excellent indicator of the sorts of room formatting you\u2019re going to get. Look on my Read Aloud ye mighty and despair!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Peter Racek Wolfhill Entertainment OSR Levels 1-4 Plunged deep beneath forsaken swamplands centuries ago, the Sunken Temple of Chloren-Var now waits to be rediscovered.\u00a0 Untold fortune, magic, and ancient secrets await those brave enough to enter the Sunken Temple, but … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6228,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/chloren.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6230"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6230\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6231,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6230\/revisions\/6231"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}